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Chronicling the 2013 SEC champion Ole Miss basketball team? It felt like you were the beat writer for a traveling circus. Murphy Holloway and Andy Kennedy are doing a comedy routine in the corner, and Marshall Henderson is doing God only knows what under the big top. You add in Reggie Buckner, and it felt like anything could happen at any given moment. But whatever it was, you wanted to witness it.

This team is not like that. There are not nearly the same big, bold personalities like Holloway and Henderson. The 2015 team is full of really nice young men, to be sure, but they don't measure up in the same way.

They don't on the court either.

That 2013 Ole Miss team clinched a bid by winning the SEC. The 2015 team went on a Thursday night to 11th-seeded South Carolina, and was the very last team to hear its name called. Dayton is a part of the NCAA tournament, but it will not feel like Ole Miss is in it really unless it beats BYU on Tuesday and goes to Jacksonville, Florida to play No. 6 Xavier on Thursday. (This is for a simple reason: no one picks the play-in games in their office brackets.)

But give the Rebels credit here, for they've now been to the NCAA tournament two times in the last three seasons. At a place like Ole Miss, with now eight total appearances, it's not nothing.

So that it came with a team that was not nearly as good as the ones Kennedy has had before in his nine years is in some ways irrelevant. This is a sport where you're ultimately judged by whether or not you're one of the 68 teams that Greg Gumbel says on Selection Sunday, and Ole Miss was.

"Sometimes it's not so much what you do, it's what the people you're competing against do," Kennedy said. "We've had teams that had equally strong as resumes, but maybe the field was a little bit stronger and we get pushed out. We certainly did not close as strongly as I would have hoped."

Ain't that the truth. Ole Miss has lost four out of five and has not beaten an NCAA tournament team since Jan. 19 (at Arkansas). Meanwhile, BYU did the hard work of digging its way of a hole, winning eight of its last nine (including a split against two-seeded Gonzaga). If you're a believer in that you are who you are at this point in the season, it's hard not to pick the Cougars on Tuesday.

The Rebels made it though. For right now, with where this program is in the Southeastern Conference landscape, that's enough.